Just when you thought the abortion debate couldn’t get any more silly and shrill, here comes the pro-abortion crew, screaming into the breach created by a new law in Virginia. First, let me hip you to the law itself. What the state did was to modify an already existing law regarding what abortion providers must do prior to providing an abortion. Here is the meat of the modification.

Except in the case of a medical emergency, at least 2 hours before the performance of an abortion a qualified medical professional trained in sonography and working under the direct supervision of a physician licensed in the Commonwealth shall perform fetal ultrasound imaging and auscultation of fetal heart tone services on the patient undergoing the abortion for the purpose of determining gestational age. The ultrasound image shall be made pursuant to standard medical practice in the community, contain the dimensions of the fetus, and accurately portray the presence of external members and internal organs of the fetus, if present or viewable.

Pretty simple, right? Before an abortion, barring any emergency, the clinic has to have an actual physician oversee a routine sonogram — note here that the law does not demand any particular type of sonogram — and give the patent the opportunity to see the results of that sonogram and hear the fetal heartbeat. That’s it.

And yet, the abortion lobby — the people who derive their living from providing, promoting, or extracting money from taxpayers for abortions — have decided to make it a big deal.

Seriously. I’m seeing headline after headline on the left about ultrasounds being “vaginal probes” that are conducted “against women’s wills” for “no medical reason.” (As if bioethics don’t constitute a medical reason.)

They are making it sound, in their phrasing, like an ultrasound is somehow comparable to rape, and Dahlia Lithwick makes the comparison explicit. Jezebel pretends that the rationale is not a bioethical one—a way for society to slow things down, see if we can think abortions through—but rather that the girl or woman has already been penetrated by the male sexual organ, which of course has nothing to do with it.

So there you go. Now a routine medical test that doesn’t have to involve a “vaginal probe” is comparable to rape because…

…well, that’s a good question, isn’t it? As Joy points out (and you really should read her entire post) there are important ethical concerns at stake here. However, the abortion at all costs crowd doesn’t want any discussion of those issues to happen. After all, if we voters started talking amongst ourselves about what “personhood” really means and whether we could reasonably extend that definition to a human being not yet born, there’s a chance we might put the brakes on the multimillion dollar abortion industry. Not coincidentally, a new phrase has entered the political lexicon: “Birth-Control Moms”. Ann Althouse (via Glenn Reynolds) calls the phrase “distractingly oxymoronic”, but it strikes me as the perfectly Orwellian construction the Democrats need to distract the electorate from their manifold failures over the past four years. Bookworm Room yanked back the curtain on their political gambit.

My sister, who is as uninterested in politics as can be, called me today outraged that Republicans generally, and Santorum specifically, are making contraception illegal. She was completely taken aback when I explained that Republicans are only trying to preserve a status quothat has been in place since 1965; namely, that contraceptives and abortifacients are freely available everywhere in the U.S., but that churches don’t have to pay for them.

The Democrats are not making contraceptives even more available than they’ve been before, which is an impossibility given their current unlimited availability. Instead, they are seeking to shift costs onto employers, including religious organizations and individuals who are doctrinally opposed to contraceptives and abortifacients.

My sister was receptive to the truth, and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to explain to her the entire story. She got that she was the victim of a Big Lie. Most voters, however, aren’t my open-minded sister and, even worse, they don’t have me sitting there walking them through the lies and smears. Instead, they’re begin manipulated into believing that Republicans and conservatives are depriving women of all access to contraceptives and then, once they’re pregnant, raping them. That’s the Big Lie, and that’s what Democrats think will win them the election in 2012.

Perhaps, though, we conservatives can turn the tables on the sudden interest in rape from the left. Perhaps we can continue to remind them of the rapes that occurred within the Occupy movement, rapes that went completely unnoticed among those who lauded the Occupiers as a genuine and honorable grassroots political movement. It seems only fair to me that if some abortion pimp wants to compare a routine medical procedure to rape, we should also compare a rape committed by an unwashed and brutal Occupier to rape, don’t you think?

And when they complain, as they inevitably will, that they were only speaking figuratively, perhaps we can note that progressive ideology has figuratively treated honest working men and women like street-walking slatterns for the past four years. Perhaps we could even have an intelligent discussion about what a right really is and why your government can never, ever grant you rights because you have all the rights you could ever want in yourself, all the time.

If, as I do, you live in the country, you have dozens of neighbors like Miss Strader – nice high-school girls who babysit your kids; you lose touch, they move to the next town, and you bump into them a couple of years later doing the late shift at the diner or the general store; they’re 23 or 24, with three kids by three different guys. And they’re still nice, and still kinda pretty, if aged beyond their years. But life and its opportunities are fled. If you’re Britney Spears and you wake up after an almighty bender next to some guy you’d rather not face the grey morning after with, there are high-priced lawyers and managers and minders to make all the bad stuff go away. If you’re Britney at the KwikkiKrap, it’s not so easy. “Free love” is free in the same sense all those government programs funded by Chinese debt are.

This is a legitimate subject for debate – especially when Obama’s Leviathan has chosen one side in the debate, and is funding it lavishly. It’s very difficult to have a functioning economy with dysfunctional human capital – that’s as true for America as it is for Greece.

After all, if it’s fair to sling around the ridiculous hyperbole, surely the brave souls of the progressive left can take a little bit slung back at them, can’t they? Well, to hell with them if they can’t. They’re playing a dirty game and we’re letting them get away with it. It’s time we started calling them out on their wicked and selfish games and put the debate back where it belongs — on the crashing failure of their morally and fiscally bankrupt beliefs.